TrueLife - Rev. Dr. Jessica Rochester - Rochester

Episode Date: July 6, 2023

One on One Video Call W/George https://tidycal.com/georgepmonty/60-minute-meetingSupport the show:https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_US🚨🚨Curious about the future of psychedelics? Imagine if Alan Watts started a secret society with Ram Dass and Hunter S. Thompson… now open the door. Use Promocode TRUELIFE for Get 25% off monthly or 30% off the annual plan For the first yearhttps://www.district216.com/https://www.revdrjessicarochester.com/Rev. Dr. Jessica Rochester is the Madrinha and President of Céu do Montréal, a Santo Daime (Ayahuasca) Church she founded in 1997 in Montréal, Canada.She is a transpersonal counselor, she trained in the work of Dr. Roberto Assagioli and trained with Dr. Stanislav Grof.She worked with Health Canada from 2000 until 2017 to achieve an Section 56 Exemption to import and serve the Santo DaimeSacrament (Ayahuasca).She is an ordained Interfaith Minister with a Doctorate in Divinity.From 1986 to 2018 she has been a workshop leader, teacher, and in private practice.She is the author of Ayahuasca Awakening A Guide to Self-Discovery, Self-Mastery and Self-Care, Volume One and Two.She continues to lecture on consciousness, non-ordinary states of consciousness, self-discovery, spiritual development, health and well-being and personal transformation One on One Video call W/George https://tidycal.com/georgepmonty/60-minute-meetingSupport the show:https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_USCheck out our YouTube:https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPzfOaFtA1hF8UhnuvOQnTgKcIYPI9Ni9&si=Jgg9ATGwzhzdmjkg

Darkness struck, a gut-punched theft, Sun ripped away, her health bereft. I roar at the void. This ain't just fate, a cosmic scam I spit my hate. The games rigged tight, shadows deal, blood on their hands, I'll never kneel. Yet in the rage, a crack ignites, occulted sparks cut through the nights. The scars my key, hermetic and stark. To see, to rise, I hunt in the dark, fumbling, fear. Hears through ruins maze, lights my war cry, born from the blaze.

The poem is Angels with Rifles. The track, I Am Sorrow, I Am Lust by Codex Serafini. Check out the entire song at the end of the cast. Ladies and gentlemen, happy Fourth of July. I hope the world is singing. I hope that you've got to be next to the person you love the most. I am here with an incredible guest. We've got a great show for you today.

the one and only Reverend Dr. Jessica Rochester. She is the Madrina and president of the Sioux de Montreal, a Santo Dime church she founded in 1997 in Montreal, Canada. She is a transpersonal counselor. She trained in the work of Dr. Roberto Asagioli and trained with Dr. Stanislavgraw. She worked with Health Canada from 2000 until 2017 to achieve a section 56 exemption to import and serve the Santa Diamese sacrament. She is an ordained interfaith minister with a doctorate in divinity. From 86 to 2018, she has been a workshop leader, a teacher, and in private practice.

Recently, she is the author of Iawasca Awakening's, a guide to self-discovery, self-mastery, and self-care, volumes one and two. She continues to lecture on consciousness, non-ordinary states of consciousness, self-discovery, spiritual development, health, and well-being, and personal transformation. She's also an incredible wealth of knowledge and an incredible person to speak to. I'm so thankful you've taken a moment to hang out with me today and help us learn a little bit about self-love. Dr. Jessica Rochester, how are you today? Well, I'm really happy to be spending time with you because really you're such a great host.

It's always fun to hang out with you. You always have good questions. You're always in this wonderful mood. And my best part is when the ginger cap comes to visit. Always. that's right so must know that I love cats so we have been you know chatting once a month now for a while about things that are really important to me and it's about 50 years now that I've been working with people and and you know actively working on my spiritual path beyond just having

experiences but really being dedicated to understanding myself and out of training to understand myself, I found that people were wanting me to help them understand themselves, okay? And so you work your way with a few credentials here and there to be able to do that with, you know, accountability and ethics. And so it's been a really interesting journey. And we started talking about my books a few months ago. And we, we, this period of time, we're working in volume Two, part one is really the fourfold practice of self-care. So today we're continuing a conversation we started last month. We talked about self-awareness and how that needs to be the first step in our understanding

of ourselves. Because if we're only living in our head, then it's really hard to understand what's going on downstairs in the basement, you know? And I'll never forget how many decades ago when neuroscience and, you know, the frontiers of science were shifting and all this flood of information was coming out that was just so fascinating, couldn't get enough of it, and continues to this day. And when they discovered that we have neurotransmitter receptors in throughout our body, but a main concentration in lower gut. and everybody was shocked, they're supposed to be in your brain. Okay, here's the old body, soul, person, human model. Okay, your transmitters are supposed to be in the brain.

What are the receptors doing down in your lower gut, you know? So this was fascinating as to, that means your gut's talking to your head, right? Hmm. Okay. Where's the conversation? Okay. Then when if you use the shack model and you understand, okay, all our survival stuff is way down your root chakra, right?

Who I am in the world and is feeling secure and my survival instinct. So, of course, it has to be talking to the brain. You know, they have to have a very good, clear communication. Now, why are we talking about that? Self-awareness, okay? So we wandered around that and we're always going to come back to awareness, awareness, awareness, and consciousness. And today we're talking about the second principle, which is self-love. And what the heck is that?

Why don't we take a moment and define what is love? Okay, we're all in your court. There you go, George. Your turn. Okay. Well, I was thinking about this. And I think that love is a process. It's a, I wrote down that love is a process.

It is that which guides and paves the seeker path, the seeker's path to union with the divine life. But I really love the idea of it as a process. I think that would be my main takeaway. Okay. That's a good definition. I like that a lot, you know. And all the years I was teaching, that was one thing that I would ask, you know, my students is what's love. And we'd work on, work on, work on definitions of it.

And then I would bring it a real on to a definition that I really love that is not original to me. It's called Peck, the American psychiatrist, is his definition. And he says, love is a space that you create for others to grow in. That is beautiful. You like that, eh? I do. I really do. It's a good one.

It's really a good one. And so that's the one that, because love is so complicated, it has so many things attached to it. So let's use that as today's working model, but love is a place, a space that we create for someone to grow in. Now we can understand what self-love is about. Oh, am I creating a space for me to grow in? It's not just creating a space for somebody else to grow in. That's good. You know, love is what we invest our time and energy in.

And so that gets really interesting. Okay, all my time and energy that I put into something. So somebody loves their garden, then they spend time in their garden and they're weeding and pruning and planting them, you know. And somebody else loves, I don't know, hockey, choose anything. want. Okay, so they're at the hockey games and they're playing hockey and their kids have to learn hockey and, you know, and so there's all kinds of ways of loving. There's all kinds of things, you know, oh, I love your pink sweater. Is it vastly different from I love my children? Okay,

and yet it's a word that we toss around. Okay, so it's really worth trying to have a conversation about it to find out what it is and what it isn't. So to find out a little bit more about what it is, Let's talk about what it isn't, what love really isn't, okay, that people can use with love. Well, first of all, I think a long ago we talked about the four stages of growth. Humans develop and go through four major stages, and there's little passages and stages in between them. That would be dependency, our young stage, essentially age six and under, when we're fully dependent on parents, caregivers, family, the tribe. And then there's counterdependency, which happens beginning kind of preteen through the teenage years. And that's where we're pushing away from parents, pushing away from

society, pushing away. We have new ideas and we reach out to our peers. Okay. This is very important step. We have to take this step. If it's swarded, then it creates problems later that we end up having to deal with in base, mostly in relationships. The third stage is independence. Now, independence around the world, so it comes somewhere usually in Western civilization anyway, between the ages of 18 and 21. We're allowed to vote. We're allowed to drive a car.

We're allowed to buy a glass of wine in a restaurant. Okay? So we can do those major markers of adulthood somewhere between the ages of 18 and 21. And why then is because our body's matured to its pretty much adult size. There's not a lot of growth. general genetic geared growth. Yes, we can put on weight. Okay, but we're building muscles. You know, we've reached adult basic body size and our conceptual level is shifting into a really more mature adult. We're able to assess ourselves in the world differently and make

different level of decisions for our self and our well-being. And then the fourth stage, which is when we hopefully work towards most of our life is interdependency. When we recognize that we're not dependent, we're not counterdependent. We don't have to push everything away and rebel against everything and fight with everything. We're not alone and solitary and independent. We have this interdependency. We're in a network, not just with society, we're with nature. You know, I need hydrochobac.

You and I would not be able to talk if I didn't have hydrochobacco back providing electricity. for me. I need the grocery stores. I need the bus drivers. I need that I we we all are interconnected. And and that is the step of maturity that we need to take that we recognize that interdependency is not dependency. Okay. It's an sure understanding of our place in the world and recognizing that you need me and I need you. And if we all, if we get that, we work together, then we can start creating those spaces. You hear that where I'm coming from, then you can start creating spaces for ourselves, for our community, for our nature, you know, for our nation.

Then we can we can do that when we see that that's possible. Okay. So love is not dependency. Do many people get into relationships. I need you. I'll die without you. That's not love. That's dependency.

We might feel like we're going to die if we're not with our beloved, but we actually won't. We might be heartbroken. We might be sad. We may be grieving. All normal, healthy human experiences, but die, we won't. And, you know, we have been fed, and that ties dependency kind of issues tie into the romantic myth in our culture. And if you look at especially for women, you know, someday my prince will come and he's going to be on a horse and there's a castle. I mean, we are fed.

Women are fed this dependency, this romantic story about being dependent on some, you know, savior figure, usually male figure who's going to come and rescue us and take us off to some kind of promised land. And this is so deeply embedded in our culture. You won't find it so much in other cultures. I'm not quite sure why it's like fast food. It's really popular in our culture. I mean, I don't understand how people eat fast food. And hey, I like a good romance, you know, comedy, drama, movie, as much a story, as much as the next person.

But I don't think it's real. There's a difference here. Okay. And so we have this deep in our society. and where does it come from? And, you know, and look how unfair it is to men. Men have to be this kind of model of something. They can't just be a human who happens to be male

and with their own wiring and their own way of being, you know. And so it's so unfair on both sides, these kind of romance, love stories that exist in our cultures. Enjoy them, but the same way you'd enjoy them as a slice of, cake or an ice cream. It's good in your mouth, but you don't want it as a regular diet, right? So love is not dependency. Love is not.

Love needs to be interdependency. Otherwise, it's childish. I love you and I need you to be what I need you to be to fulfill me. That's dependency. You know, if you don't, if you don't fulfill my, emotional needs, my something, my something, my something, fill in the blank, then you're not loving me. If you love me, you will give me this that I'm demanding from you. Now, that's vastly different from couples working on fair, reasonable, and mature expectations, right? Yeah. Fair,

adult, reasonable expectations around communication and boundaries and support. Absolutely, that should be part of healthy relationship. But one person demanding that another person be something to fulfill them, to fulfill these conscious unconscious expectations and longings, that gets confused with love. I love you so much that I will be what you want me to be. In other words, I will kill off me to be the thing that you want me to be. How is that love?

You tell me, how is that love? watching your face and you're going, oh, my God. It just makes sense. I mean, so many relationships die because they become what they think the other person wants them to be. And when they do that, they erase the very foundation on which they built the relationship. Yeah. You know?

And so how does that happen? I'm going to share a little bit while we're doing the romantic love. Sure. It's so popular in our culture. And is lean into the work of a doctor. Cardinal Hendricks, and he wrote a number of books, getting the love you want, keeping the love you find, et cetera, et cetera. And he has a really good model.

And the model that he uses is that he believes that we internalize, and I agree 100% that we internalize when we're born, we kind of fall in love with our parents. Okay, we fall in love with because we have no boundaries. We don't understand boundaries. We're this baby who's just filled with self-awareness. wants to explore everything, okay? And we get these attachments.

You know, it doesn't matter if we're a baby bird or if we're a baby dolphin, if we're a baby penguin, it doesn't matter. Okay, we bond with our parents. We need to for survival. So the sound of their voice, how they smell, how they are, we actually internalize that. Okay, so when you see Mama Penguin coming back to this huge flock of penguins, and she's going, whack, whack, or whatever they do this,

I'll talk more than a penguin, Ben. you know, how do they recognize each other? It's that slightly different quack, quack, or little noise they make, you know, Hong Kong or something, you know. And so we internalize that. We take in that sound and that smell, and then we take in their attitudes and their behaviors and stuff from their unconscious just get packed in, okay?

Because that's just how it is. And then somehow that becomes our model for love. Doesn't that sound crazy? But that somehow becomes an internal image. And I really like his work because it talks sense. It's those deep early bonds that get created for survival get confused up with what love and love isn't. And then it also gets confused up. It can with their own identity.

Don't want to be like mom. Don't want to be like dad. So I end up instead of being me, I am not mom. I don't really bad. So I'm just living my life being not mom and dad instead of living my life being me. So these things are really deep. Is it making sense? Some of the things I'm saying?

Yeah. Go ahead. You have a question? No, I was just agreeing with you that it does make a lot of sense. And it's among the first times I've heard it put that way. So thank you. I'm just amazed at the idea that so many people can spend time. not being something and in doing so not being themselves that's a like i never heard that statement

before it's it's really profound i really enjoy it and and so we we pack in these kind of let's call them for now images is internal images or templates for what we think love is and it's not a thinking up here thing it's a it's a thing you know we see somebody and something goes jingle jingle jingle in sight okay we call that attraction we call it whatever we want. But also, it seems that our unconscious is having a chat with their unconscious. How good a fit are they with my image of love, okay, on this vibrational unconscious level. The other thing we appear to be doing, according to research, is we're doing some kind of a scan, kind of a genetic scan. Is this a good mate for me? Is this a good partner for me? Do they have something that are,

again, our unconscious is scanning people for it. I mean, it's just fascinating. And then there's this attraction. Then there's this kind of all these unconscious mechanisms that are going on. Then we think we fall in love. And what is that falling in love process? It's when our boundaries collapse, you know, I and my beloved are now one. Okay.

We find all these ways that we are one. Okay. I like pink and you like pink. And I like Chinese and you like Chinese and you like. whatever, baseball. I like baseball and so, oh my God, we're soulmates. Okay. You like classical music and I love classical music and I mean, we can go on and on. Right. And oh, we're soulmates. We're soulmates. We're men to be together.

Okay. But how come that doesn't last? Pauling in love is a precursor to intimacy. Put more bluntly is a precursor to sexually. And of course, so attraction and falling in love is something that seems to need to happen for us to be able to, as humans, create a relationship whereby we are going to probably produce offspring. Or, you know, that's one of the big goals that nature has, by the way, is draw us together. Just look at nature, okay? Draw us together to procreate. Okay, we make it more complicated because we want all of these things out of it.

You know, we want the nest fluffy a certain way and we want what kind of fish brought to the nest. And okay, so we get really fussy about all that stuff and that again, culture, society being just human beings. And so all of these things are going on. So falling in love, is that love? No, I don't think that's love. Not according to the people who've done all the research and the people who just. really look at it is a beautiful, wonderful stage that we go through. But it's not going to last. We can recreate aspects of it if we have a certain level of maturity and commitment. But usually

the best thing that we can do is allow the in love phase to develop into mature love. And what does that look like? And what does mature love? What does mature love? love look like. Go ahead. What does it look like for you? Interdependence. Interdependency, right. Recognizing that we don't

own the other person, we can't shape them into what we need them to be to hopefully fill something inside of us, that we can create that space where that person can grow, even if it feels a little threatening to us. A person wants

to go back to school and learn a whole new career. They want to do something completely different, take up some interest that they never did before, and how do we create and negotiate all of those different things that happen in relationship? So love is not dependency and love is not romance, okay, although it's certainly a stage, a wonderful stage, everybody loves that stage and they want more of it. That again, it's like more ice cream, okay? So you're going to enjoy it at the moment, but it won't last. So, What other kinds of love are there?

Well, there's so many other kinds of love, you know? Right? How you love that lovely ginger cat is different from how you love your wife, right? Sure. I mean, you love them kind of the same way, but that's different. Yeah. And where's the source of love? That's a great question.

And I think that the source of love is recognizing yourself and the other, recognizing, and maybe not just in the person you're with, but recognizing that you're part of something bigger, all of you. Yeah. You know, I love that old B.G.'s song, nobody gets too much love anymore. That's a great song. Something about I'm waiting in line. Okay. It's a great song. I'm waiting in line for love.

Okay. And that's, you know, really feeding into kind of the American myth. So where is the source of love? Okay. Before we get there, let's look at codependency. We've talked about dependency. We've talked about romance. We're talking about the things that come sandwiched in with love and packaged with love,

but aren't love. They're their own thing unto themselves. dependency is its own thing, you know, romance is its own thing. Hopefully love is there with the romance, but you soon find out if the love isn't there and if it's just attraction. And there's nothing wrong with attraction, by the way. I don't want anybody to think I'm saying something wrong with that, as long as you make sensible decisions around it, which is a little hard to do when you're seriously attractive,

but never mind. That's for the, right? Okay, so what's codependency? Do you have a definition for us or do you want me to pop that one out? Codependency. Codependency. I would go with the codependency is not having or is, I guess I would say something along lines of codependency is seeing your identity through the words of someone else.

That's an interesting definition. My definition is based in the work of Anne Wilson-Shief, Melody Beatty. Anne Wilson-Shaf, very well-known, very well-published, author in the field of codependency, independency, addictions, et cetera. And codependency is really looked at as a, not as an addiction, but as a deep response to young situations. And so where does that codependent word come from? It actually comes from the early days of identifying the problem with alcoholism

and through the 50s, the work that 12 steps programs, Bill Wilson, the founder of the 12 steps programs. And so they were using, trying to use language to describe the behavior of the family members around the dependent, on alcohol person, okay, the addict. Okay, let's, are we comfortable with that word, the addict? We good with that? Okay, I don't want anybody to feel again that I'm, that it's in the words of criticism, but the person who has a dependency on alcohol

or drugs or something, gambling or whatever it is, okay? Let's just call out the addict for now. And, but what they noticed, all the researchers and the individuals working, the teams of people working, trying to support people, was that the family members had really interesting behavior that they started to label codependent, okay? Because they would be accommodating the addict in ways psychologically, mentally, emotionally, okay? When that's, okay, this is going to be very kind of profiling, but let's say dad's an alcoholic, okay? It doesn't matter. Mom, dad, choose one. doesn't matter. Okay, well, just dad for now, okay?

And, and, you know, and I did not have alcohol in my family, so I can't speak firsthand to this. I'm only speaking from my reading and working for many decades with people. And so the behavior as such is that they would alter and change their behavior when dad was drunk. They'd be either become quiet or they disappear. They would clean up after him. They would try and hide the car keys so he wouldn't drive. There's a whole lot of behavior that goes on because they don't actually confront the addict. Or if they try to confront the addict, the addict does not accept it.

Or it becomes in some way threatening to the family. And so often it's the spouse who is codependent. The children model the codependency or try and fight it. take the rebellious or oppositional position. And so that's where the word codependent came from. It came from watching that people, family members, children, and spouses would change their behavior to accommodate and try and manage the addict's behavior. And so out of that, a whole study of codependency developed through like right of Trump,

mainly really opened up through the 80s, is where you can. really see the, you know, the research on it and the scholarly work and and well-written books talking about it. And so codependency is understood more these days. I like Melody's description where she says, where you focus on the other person being okay so that you can be okay. Like if dad's not drinking and he's okay, I can be okay. But if dad's drinking, that means I can't be okay because he's drinking. And so those behavior patterns wouldn't carry forward into work and life and relationships in which the person focuses on instead of how am I and what do I need and what's right for me

because that's not what they've been modeled and shown. They've been shown. We have to worry about that person and that person's moods and behaviors and always kind of be watching for it to try and figure out what's going to happen. the next. And then we alter our behavior to try and cope with that. What are you hearing in your own words? What's making sense to you in this? It's deep, eh? It goes deep. Yeah. So this is not love. Codependency is not love. Yeah. Me running around you trying to make, are you okay, do you need this? Do you need that? Trying to anticipate your needs. If I see that you're getting angry, trying to calm you down and pacify you and cleaning up your mass after you've made a mess and you know shushing the children

so they don't disturb you and that's all codependency and that's not love love would be standing up and saying this isn't okay this is harming us and it's not healthy for us so you stop or you go stan groff tells a wonderful story about christina groth is his his second wife she's passed away many years now and he met Christina and there was you know shaktashibi jiva and you talk about attraction and and and then they were married for many years she had children from a previous marriage and so but she was a secret alcoholic she'd wait till the kids were at school and stan was off doing what who he was doing at the university or wherever he was. Esselin who knows what at that point.

And then they realized that she was an alcoholic. And so Stan sat her down. And the kids were, you know, fairly old teenagers at that point. They could be part of the conversation. And he says, you have to choose. It's us. Are they alcohol? You choose.

When you've chosen, let us know. And that sent her into recovery. The courage, that's love. That's what love looks like, by the way. Love looks at being able to kindly create a space for someone to grow in. And you can accept it or not accept it. And so she did. She wrote a beautiful book called The Thirst for Wholeness.

If anybody's interested, it's a wonderful story of her own struggle and her own story of why she made the decisions that she made and her path of recovery. And she came to understand that underneath this, was this longing, this longing for wholeness, this thirst for wholeness. And the understanding that we each have this thirst for wholeness opened the door for her to understand where the source of love is. The love was not in the bottle.

Love was not in the bottle. And when we understand that the source of love isn't in other people, because our society teaches us that we have to be a certain way then we'll get loved. But that's not true. That's not where the source of love is. When we're babies, dependency again, we rely on the love and the attention and the care of our parents.

And so it looks like the source of love is outside of us in our parents. That's what is creating that model of love. At some point, if we have wise parents or grandparents and people in our tribe, we start to understand that, yes, people can love us. But we also have to love ourselves and what does that look like? Well, if we go through life thinking that the source of love is outside of us, then we're standing in a line with the beeches. And like loves a soup kitchen and we're going to get our bowl.

Okay. And when we realize that the source of love is inside of us, it's inside of us. That's where the source of love is. Yes. Surprise. You know, we go through life looking, looking everywhere outside of ourselves for things, and in the end, like all the great teachers are trying to teach us, it's inside of ourselves. So the source of love is in your own heart.

It's in your own soul. And how do we access that? Well, we have to get all the not love out of the way. Okay. We have to get all the not love and all the ideas about love. love. If we keep thinking, oh, I'll meet my one true love and he, she will love me, et cetera, et cetera, all man, well, that's looking for the source of love outside of ourselves. If we think, oh, if I make myself be what I think this person needs and wants me to be, then I will get loved. No, you're just being codependent. And what's happening is the person is loving the false you and not the authentically you.

So you're not going to be fulfilled at all. Too much too soon I'm just wondering how it seems like the word sacrifice is coming to my mind and it seems that is that how we get rid of all of the non-love in our heart is through sacrifice

or what role does sacrifice play in that? I'm not sure if sacrifice is the word that surrender might be surrender that we surrender ourselves and then And then that's when we do our inner work. Because, you know, it's not fair to me and it's not fair to you. If I bring all of my not love ideas about love into relationship with you

and then expect you to magically respond to those longings, expectations, et cetera. And then I'm furious with you that you haven't met those longings and needs. and feel totally justified in trashing you thoroughly because you are not meeting my needs. Okay, you are not who I need and want, and you're not giving me what I need and want. Okay. But reality check, you know, big reality check. How much of that is reasonable and fair and how much of that is just left over, unfulfilled, and that we're trying to compensate by getting it today.

So it's a huge awakening when we realize, wait a minute, the source of love is inside of me. And then we have to look at our belief systems around love and me. You know, how many, there's a wonderful psychosynthesis exercise about beliefs and some of our deepest beliefs about who I am. okay and and in those deep exercises who am i and what am i and and we can come down to these belief systems around am i lovable now if we've been if we've had some form of interruption in parental care for whatever reason if based on their own shortcomings our parents have been unable to provide sufficient loving space for us to grow in And maybe it's been a really tight, narrow little space, hard to grow in that.

You know, it's like a plant that's in a really much too small pot with not enough earth and the roots are coming out the back and trying to climb over the side looking for more earth. You know, if we've had that kind of a childhood experience, then it's been hard. And we have to understand that that's all that was. it was this lifetime's childhood experience. Wow. Lots of stuff about love, right? So we get down to, am I lovable?

And if we've had experiences of neglect or abandonment or abuse in some form, if we were bullied in the school yard, if we were ignored in school because we were taller, shorter, thinner, plumber, how wore glasses, braces, you know, had a funny name, okay? All of the reasons that kids feel that they can gang up and either ignore or bully other kids. And, you know, that's part of life. We have to learn how to manage it. But if we've had those experiences, then somewhere down deep inside of us,

we can get the I'm not lovable belief. You know? That's another thing that has to be looked at as we come to what is love and just if the source of love is inside of me. Where do I begin to love myself? Where does that genesis of self-love look like? I don't know. Well, are you willing to be vulnerable and experimental for a moment? Yeah.

Well, thank you. Thank you for your. ongoing accommodation with my questions. You can always say no. What do you believe about yourself and love? Do you believe deep down in your soul? Yes, I am the source of love in my life. I can open and receive love.

I can be the source of love and share it. And I'm creating the space for me to grow in, a healthy space for me to grow in. Well, when you put it like that, yeah, I mean, I wish I could have said it like that. I often find myself thinking about, if I'm, if I'm being honest, what I think about love is that it's almost something I can't understand. And maybe this speaks to where I'm at in my life is that I know that, you know, I can hear

the voice in my heart, tell me when I'm moving on the right path. I know when I treat someone the way that, I feel I would want to be treated or if I see, oh, they're probably going through this thing because I went through that thing. Maybe I should help do this. But I, for me, it's such a feeling, you know, and I want to continue to build my relationship and thoroughly understand what it means to build a space for others to grow in. And I think that maybe I'm learning what that, what that is.

But for me, it's, it's, it's been. up to this point of feeling. It's been an attempt to listen to a voice of a process, I guess. Does that even make, does that make sense? Yes, it makes a lot of sense that what you're doing is, is that you're listening inside of yourself to kind of a moment by moment experience of life and that you're trying to develop compassion to others. And this is all part of mature love, compassion. So what does mature love look like? Okay? It looks like compassion.

But it is a beautiful prayer by, I think it's Chief Yol-Lark, in which he talks about not allowing empathy to overwhelm us. Okay. So what love is is a space that we can first grow in because if we don't love ourselves, guess what? We can't really love others. They might be putting on a good act. We might be doing good caretaking, caregiving. But is it love? No, those are two very different things.

You go in the hospital and you have nurses and doctors and there's all kinds of people, you know, working in the strata of life who are taking care of people. But that doesn't necessarily, they're doing it. They're doing it with good conscience. They're doing it with compassion. But it's not that they love each and every single person. They may actually not like some of them at all, but they're in service. They're in service, you know? And so, again, we confuse a lot of things if you take care of me, you love me.

This is a game that a lot of people play in relationships, because I'm going to make you take care of me. I'm going to find a way to make you take care of me, and then that will be proving that you love me. No, that's really young stuff that didn't get resolved when you were growing up. Okay. If you didn't feel well taken care of in a fair and reasonable way as a child, then you will possibly either be codependent and super take care of your partner and neglect yourself, or you will demand that your partner takes care of you.

And you'll find all little sneaky, tricky ways to make sure they get to do it. So, and then none of that's love. It's all something else, but it's not. not love. So the source of love is inside me, the source of love is inside of you. And how do we nurture that? What kind of things do we do that help

us to nurture love inside of us? You said one of them, do as you would be done by, part of the perennial philosophy. Treating others the way we would like to be treated. Right.

I think I don't know. The question is, what do we develop in ourselves? Can you say the question again? Okay. How do we nurture self-love? What is it that we do that will help us to nurture self-love? So that if we love ourselves, then we know our heart is open,

and therefore we can create a space for others. I think we have to be true to ourselves. We have to not only have compassion for the people, but listen to that voice in your heart. It tells you to believe in yourself when no one else will, to follow that dream that you want and make it happen. And then you can become a path for others to follow. I think that would be another one.

What do you think? Absolutely. being true to ourselves, understanding and recognizing that, you know, when you're in the airplane and they're giving you all the little instructions, they always say, you have children, put your mask on first. You have to. If you put your mask on first, you're going to be getting what you need. Then you can take care of your children. If you try to put their mask on first, you may conk out. And then you're not going to be helping to do anything. Okay. And so that's not selfish.

A lot of people don't love themselves because it looks like selfish because that's what they taught somewhere. And that's a continuum of loving and taking care of self. It can move towards, you know, self-love and self-hate. We're going to talk about that one in a minute. Okay. And indulgence. Okay. Oh, I love myself so much. Okay. This is the continuum. And where's the balance of place? Okay. Self-hate is at one end. Okay. And there are people who genuinely hate themselves. At the root, some of the finer researchers and writers will say, at the root of true depression is self-hatred. I'm not a, you know, other kind, there are many different kinds of depressions. There's a postpartum depression and there's a seasonal affect disorder. So there's many different, and there's a life circumstance, you know, there's the grieving process that can really mimic a depression, you know, the loss of a loved one.

I'm talking about that. I'm talking about ongoing clinical depression where somebody isn't going through a passage that has a trigger to it. you know, the loss of something important to them, a career or, you know, a loved one. But, you know, you can't point to something and say, well, that happened. And that's why I'm feeling this way, an ongoing, that usually self-hatred is at the root of that blocked grief and self-hager. So we have this continuum. One end is self-hatred. And it could be very unconscious. If you, as soon as you start looking for it, it's that iceberg.

You can see it poking up. You can see. I'm talking about how you recognize it in a moment. Okay, at the other end is self-indulgence. I love me and I do everything for me. Well, that's narcissism. Okay. The most important being in the entire universe.

Only what I want, what I need. Forget you. Don't care about what you need. My needs first, only always. Okay. And that's indulgence. That's not love. Okay.

Is it? It's not anything I would recognize as loving. Anybody who's had a narcissistic current or partner can tell you immediately does not feel loving. Doesn't feel loving at all. You know, a set of angry demands that we serve their needs. That's not love. So how do we, what is that self-love that looks like a balanced place, like a healthy place, like a caring place where there's a balance of caring for ourselves and caring for others,

of keeping our heart open, but being able to say no. I love you and no. Children are good practice, and so are grandchildren. I love you, sweetheart, and it's still no. Love you, sun, moon, and stars. I always say that to my grandson. I love me sun, moon, and stars, because the cosmos, it's still no. And so love sets boundaries.

Love has limits. love has a deep sense of what's right, a sense of authenticity with the true self. You just said that. Isn't it in my inner voice and knowing kind of what's calling me and what I need to follow? Yeah, that's part of self-love is trusting the inner voice. Yeah, we're going to make mistakes.

Yeah, we are going to make mistakes. And self-law means that we have to learn how to. forgive ourselves. That's another thing that's in the way that we get to. Self-hatred, okay? So, yeah, we're going to make mistakes. And we also have a character that I, you know, are you perfect? I'm not.

You know, thank goodness we're born with some character flaws. Imagine how impossible it would be. Anyway, but we have to learn how to manage our character flaws. We have to learn how to have a little sense of humor about them. We need to have some feedback. Nothing like children to give you feedback about your good. Radar for them. They can read them pretty quickly.

And so here we have this body and this soul and this mind and these feelings and this character and karma. And we're these complex individual as all part of our earlier conversations around self-discovery. And now we're looking at, okay, I'm trying to discover who I am and what I'm. all about and all my things that make me who I am. How do I love all of that? I'm supposed to love my character flaws? Well, actually, if you create that space that love is to grow in, then that means we can have kind of a neutral.

I always say to people, the power of neutral is so recognized. You know, it's love or hate. No, what about neutral? Just a neutral space. There's no condemnation. We don't have to be crazy about it and think it's marvelous. We can just say, oh, okay, this is what is so. This is a reality in my life.

This is part of who I am. And the serenity prayer. Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. The courage to change the things that I can and the wisdom to know the different. And so courage. Love is courage. So love is self-awareness. So love is self-acceptance. Accept ourselves and accept others for who they are.

Love is courage. The courage to change what we can change. We can change our habits. We can change our beliefs. change our beliefs, we can change our behavior. There's some things we cannot change. Can't change our genetics. You know, our physiology, we can change a little bit, you know, epigenetics, sorry, you know, with epigenetics, with good lifestyle habits, we can enhance what we've got. We can't actually change it. We can't change the four great truths of the Buddha. is difficult. No one escapes illness or suffering. We all age. We all die. Okay, we can't change those

things. This is physical matter reality. We live here and just the, you know, the physicist would teach us, good luck with trying to change that because we're all on a continuum, you know, and everything, including some insects that only live one day. That's their whole life cycle, is one day. They fly around, find a mate, die. And then there's stars. Their life cycle is billions of years. And so everything has a beginning, middle, and end. And how do we create this space of love, knowing that there's some things we just need to accept.

You're in the George life. I'm in the Jessica life. Okay. There's some things we need to accept. That's part of love, too. Acceptance. So courage to face who I am and what life is. Acceptance.

What I can change, what I can change. All of these aspects are part of mature love. So love allows us to grow and embrace these aspects of love. The more we let ourselves grow in love, the more we find that we can have healthy limits. We can recognize, this is me and this is you. You can have your thoughts and your feelings and your needs and express them. And I can create a space of respecting and listening.

And you can respect that I need with my differences and my thoughts and needs and feelings and inspirations and what have you. And then love is the space that we create together that we grow in. We've been creating this space, this whole conversation. about love and the depths of love without it kind of coming into the into the moment it's beautiful yeah we're creating this space right now for whoever might be listening or watching but that they can join us in a space that has respect it has courage has limits and all the things that are not love we're doing our best to bow to them namaste and let them go we don't have to fight them we don't have to hate them just about of them they're part of life

they served us all of these not loved things served us we were taught them we learned them if we need to grieve we grieve we grieve our losses but we didn't have what we wanted or we didn't get what we needed we have to grieve those we can't compensate nobody's going to come and you know you didn't get enough food when you're little, you can eat as much food as you want today. It's not going to make a difference. Compensating doesn't work. It doesn't work. We have to grieve that we didn't have enough food or attention or love or something. Safety. Big ones, safety. When we were little, we grieve that. And that releases

our heart. So we're looking at, are you ready for self-hate? Yeah, let's do it. Self-hatred is so tight. It's so confining. It's so denying. It denies our authenticity. It denies our, the kind of the exhilarance of being alive.

Now, where does it come from? Where would you imagine that self-hatred comes from? I think it's maybe a combination of a learned behavior and a survival mechanism, like a defense mechanism. Yes, and I think that there are some people that are kind of a little bit more predisposed. Taking in the more difficult or negative or being impacted by them. Some people might be a little bit more, you know, water off ducks back. I mean, I've worked at people who've gone through extremely. difficult early childhood experiences.

And yet, because of their character and the nature that they have, they've been able to see it comes to terms with it, grieve it, and really, you know, and somehow they survived it and did well and accomplished and, you know what I'm saying, and went on with careers or families or, you know, what have you. And then other people, you think, are they more fragile in some way that we don't fully understand. Are they the canary in the month down the mind? You know, are they the first person to react to the slight change in the, in the atmosphere or something? And so how do we support people who are, how do we support people who need that extra understanding or support

or what have you to be able to come to terms with what they went through? It's the same way people come back from fighting in the war and some people go, wow, that was really tough. And wow. Okay. You know what? I'm just glad to be alive. And I'm going to say prayer every day for my buddies that fell. And I'm so grateful to be alive and to be here and what have you.

And then you have the full spectrum of reaction to devastation and loss. Okay. And so we have to accept that that's the spectrum of human. Okay. It's not like some people are right and some people are wrong. It's just like some people have a gift of song or music or some people can write and some people can cook and some people can carve. And so what do we do we do in life to create a space?

The best space that we can, okay, for people who have self-hatred. And self-hatred can come from many places. It can, I think that, you know, I believe in reincarnation. I think I believe karma is kind of I've seen too many things and experienced too many things to say it doesn't exist. I'm still holding a very loose definition of what it's about. It's not hard and fast. It's just that when you've had so many experiences in non-ardinary states, you have to say there's really something there and something about it,

without having, you know, exactly, you know, written and stone ideas about it. And so I think that the karma plays a role to it. Do we enter into this life already what I describe in in volume one with a carmic preset where we come into life already kind of tuned to a certain frequency? And I would say, yeah, I think that's an important part of it. If we've had really difficult life, past life experiences, we come into this lifetime and then we're kind of in an environment, we've already, we're carrying the car, of we're carrying that, of guarding the heart and not trusting and sheltering ourselves and then

possibly interpreting everything that happens around us personally in a negative way. And how to help people shift that. So self-hatred can come from all kinds of places. I believe that ancestral memories can play a role. There's a lot of research done on children, adult children of Holocaust survivors, for example, that was done decades ago, decades and decades ago when they realized that people who've gone through such tremendously difficult experiences and such terrible losses, that that was, you know, carried in their being and that that affected on down into the next generation. And so we look and we say, in the end, how much is mine?

How much is mine in this lifetime? Am I kind of hating life or hating myself because those things kind of go together because of things that happened in my ancestral line? Do I have, am I carrying something because I lived it over and over and past lives? I remember doing that once sharing, somebody sharing in a breathwork and a work of Stan Groff that I did for many years, the holotropic breathwork, very deep experiential work in an non-ordinary state of consciousness and we'd have a circle of sharing afterwards and and people would frequently share deep understandings about why they felt low self-esteem

in this life or why they felt such a degree of shame or guilt or something and I remember one person sharing that they had touched into a past life in which they were maybe not a general but you know somewhere up along high ranking in the armies and they were really angry at what was happening in this particular battle and sent all of their men in just out of personal rage and then watched all their troops get killed and destroyed because it wasn't the moment to send them in and that deep understanding that in that lifetime that they had that many people had died out of the personal rage of revenge against the other side rather than what's the most strategic way that I can protect the men who are fighting on behalf of this cause okay and the deep pain that person felt

I was responsible for the loss of all those lives you know that opened a really deep grieving process of trying to heal and make karmic right to and there's ways of doing that and so we can have all of these things happening, you know, that get in the way of self-love. How can we have self-love if we're carrying these things? I can see a question on your face. What's your president? Well, that's, it just reminds me of William Tennyson's the Light Brigade, right? Like they charge in at the wrong time. And so in my mind, you're telling me that, I'm like, oh, my God, I can see the idea of the. So, and then I think about the, the, the, the, the, brigade and past lives and I think about generational trauma and then it takes me back to the idea

of it's so important to me hearing this conversation to begin making the necessary changes in your life because what if it is passed down to your kids and your kids kids kids and your great great grandkids like if you can begin to change it in you right now yes that's courage to change Yeah. I can. Back to the serenity prayer. People don't understand the power of that. The serenity to accept the things they can't change.

The courage to change the things that I can. Again, we can change our beliefs, our behavior, our habits. We can change all of those things. Some things we can't change. We can't change the war that we waged in a past life. That's done. It's written. Can't change it.

What we can change is our relationship to it. We can't change what happened to our. ancestors, we can change our relationship to it. We can do something in this lifetime that will release and transform that karma and release and transform our heart space. So that our, again, getting all the not love stuff out of the way, we can't love ourselves if we're carrying some form of self-hatred or self-dislike. If every time we do something, we hate ourselves, whatever that thing is, whatever that thing is, we're gossiping about our name. And then we go, oh, really?

So what am I doing that for? Okay, or we eat that extra piece of pie. I don't know, whatever it is, okay, that we do that we go, oh. Okay. Well, how do we have the grace to say, oh, okay, well, I have the power to change that. I have the power and the courage to change that. If I don't want to feel that anymore, then I don't do that anymore. And if I need help and not doing that anymore, I'm going to ask for help.

Because that's what love is. Self-love is asking for help when you. you need it. I'm being ashamed of needing help. We all need help from time to time with something. You know, tax time. I need help from my accountant to do my tax returns. Okay.

I need my dentist. I can't do my own dental work. So asking for help when we need it in a fair, respectful, and sensible way. So where are we with love now? What's your understanding? We started off with what's your definition of love? Where are you now with love? Well, I got a lot of work to do.

That much I know. You know everybody else. You mean it's a moment-in-moment daily experience. But yeah, it's really beautiful in so many ways to think about the difference. And this is just my personal, as we're talking, what I've learned so far is that, you know, some of the things that I, I thought were dependents are actually a mature form of interdependence. And it's easy to get lost in that translation and see that negative connotation that maybe you grew up with.

Like, oh, that's the wrong thing. But if you just step back and sometimes heightened states of awareness allow us to see that, oh, that aha moment of like, wait a minute, this is a necessary connection in order for us all to grow in a way that's going to work. So I feel like that it's an incredible conversation. I feel that this idea of love for me is becoming a more mature idea and understanding. The same way the world unfolds in front of you and around you, so too is my understanding of love beginning to unfold in a way that I can begin to see it, feel it and be it. Yes, because it's a speech.

that we can live in. It's an energetic psychic space. I don't have the right words. It's really hard to describe the unseen realms. We have the right vocabulary to describe the things that aren't tangible, okay? And we can describe a desk and a chair and a car and a bird and stuff like that and we can say I'm happy or I'm sad or I'm frustrated or I'm tired. We're pretty good at doing all of that, but when it comes to those intangible things that are so much bigger than us, okay? And so, you know, let's take it just that next step. Okay, we're looking at love. We're looking at self-love.

It's the second in the four principles, what I believe are the four principles of self-care, self-awareness, self-love, self-respect, and self-responsibility. and we're looking at how do I open my heart and first of all I need to let my heart grieve whatever is left over that I haven't grieved yet because that's the first thing that happens with heart openings is boff comes all the stuff that wasn't grieved, okay? That's a process and definitely it's a process

and it's not like a one-time thing. And so allowing the heart space to open and expand learning about healthy boundaries, learning about healthy communication. If I love myself, then I'm going to ensure that how I am sharing what I need to share about me is done in a way that will be the most respectful.

We're doing as I would be done by. And we're looking at, okay, all the not love things, how do I get them out of the way, dependency? That's not love. Romance, a delicious, wonderful stage in human experiences, okay, that we can recapture moments of it. When you have a loving, mature relationship with somebody, you can create romance. It's not going to last 24-7, it can't, okay?

And, you know, it's like you have a good meal and then you're full. You don't want any more food. You're full, okay? So these things come and go. We're hungry. We eat. We're full. We're fine.

We're tired. We sleep. We're rested. We get up and go. And so all of these things are always changing somewhat. But the mature relationship can create some romance. There's lots of literature written on that. How to recreate some romance and intimacy that gets created out of that.

And then there's all the getting rid of what's in the way, the codependency and self-hatred and dependency issues and expectations and social and cultural ideas about what love is. and what love should be and my soulmate and the other half of me. No, that was your mom. Yes, we were connected in the same body by an umbilical cord. We were in her uterus. Let's get very physiological here.

And so when we separated from the oneness with mother, that creates that whole thing about those one of us and now there's two of us. Okay. And if we don't deal with that piece, and it will obscure our ideas about love. And so the possibility of having a mature love for ourselves and a mature love for others will always include good communication and healthy boundaries and setting limits

and being clear on what is love and what is other stuff. And it's fine to talk about other stuff as long as we're not trying to wrap it up in the love. You know, it brings to the, it brings to my mind this idea that when we talk about, if we can just go back for a moment about this idea of, of the potential for generational trauma and the learned behavior, whether it was in a past life or whether it was in, you know, something you find in breathwork or whether it was. or whether it was a time of survival that your families really had to fight. And so they didn't have the need or they didn't have the ability to give you what they needed at that time. If we hold that in that container, I've recently been hearing about, you know, on some level this idea, purging for my family.

And so when you think about those two things together, is purging for your family a way in which you find a way? to work through that trauma so that you no longer have to pass on that trauma. Yes. Yes. And so that's part of the reality. I'll be autobiographical. That's helpful. Okay. I mentioned that my father, if I mentioned, he was in the war. He was a major in the British Army. He'd been stationed before the war for five years in India, had extraordinary experiences in India the years that he was there. And then just before the war started, met my mom. And they decided to get married and the war was starting and was happening. And so they made an agreement on his side. He said, I refuse to have children. I don't want to leave you a war widow,

which was a very strong possibility with a young child or young children. I'm not going to do that. This is love. This is what love looks like. I love you enough that if something happens to me, I want you to be able to go forward and have a healthy and happy life. That's what love looks like. And so, you know, the war happened and the war was difficult. And it was difficult for everybody who fought in it. It doesn't matter which side you were on. Okay. And he came back from the war. And his way of dealing with it was never talk about it. I survived. I'm whole. I'm here. We're starting a new chapter in our life. We're going to have a family. We're going to have two children.

They did. My sister and myself. And we're going to move to Canada, which is what they did. And we're going to make a whole new life. And that chapter is closed. It took me decades and of growing up to and then doing my own deep work to understand that no matter, my father would have walked through fire for us. He was a wonderful man.

He would have walked across the ocean for us. But he lived, his emotions lived kind of behind a kind of barrier. Like if you, there was some part of a soul that you felt you just couldn't connect with. He was polite. He was respectful. He was kind. But he wasn't, some part of him wasn't there. Does this make sense?

Yeah. Yeah. It wasn't there. And of course, growing up, I didn't understand that. You know, I just didn't understand it. You know, as I went forward, I thought, well, British, stiff upper lip. You know, we were born in England, of course, and had that raising at that era, you know. I was born in 49, so, you know, he was a little older.

They were just that little bit older, having gone through the war and waited to have children. And so, you know, but there was some part of him that you couldn't access. And then at some point, as an adult, and I'm doing, you know, all this deep, more experiential work, I have this profound dream. And dreams are really important to me. And those of you who are interested in reading my books, I write about dreams and the role they can play in understanding ourselves. And I had this really important dream in which I'm sitting talking to my father. And he says to me, sorry, I'm going to need a Kleenex. I think I'm moved here.

He says to me, he says, he's very open in the dream. And he says to me in a very loving and beautiful way. He says to me, please understand the two things happen to me in my life. And that's why I am the way I am. When he was very young, his father died. And from the age of six, he was having to help. I think he was pulling a little cart with coal on it. I mean, you have to understand what Britain was like, a turn of the century.

And so he said, what I saw as a child, what I experienced as a child and what I saw in the war, and that changed everything for me. It's like, wow, there's nothing to do with me. It's not about me at all. But somewhere inside of me that I didn't even know had personalized that kind of barrier that he had put up to protect himself from a young child and then going through the war and what he saw. I mean, he was with the troops that liberated Berger-Belsen, one of the death camps. You know, he saw action in Germany during the war. There's a lot of hard things that he experienced and saw, and he just put that shield up to not, to try and not contaminate. Do you know what I'm saying?

That's what I really got, that this was love on his side. He would say, no, I don't talk about it. It's not for young children to be hearing these things. It's not for young women to be hearing these things. When we were, you know, teenage girls, no, no, these are hard things, girls. They're hard things. It's not for you to be hearing, you know. And he just changed the subject.

And so, but that was love. But it took me a long, it took me until that dream to understand. But that was him loving and not having. any tools to deal with what he'd had to experience different today from what, you know, now there's programs and their support and there's all kinds of things. But it's so easy to not understand that what somebody is doing genuinely out of love may not look like love on the other side. A parent saying no, doesn't look loving. A parent trying to keep something from affecting children, me look like, hey, I can't, there's something inside of you, I can't

reach, I can't connect with. So for me, everything changed after that. And my, my relationship with him, which was always good, it just shifted somewhere into something else in which something that I didn't even know that I was holding was gone. Does this make some sense? It's like the drama that it affected him ended up affecting me. And I could never watch a movie that had war in it. I'd sit there deep, sobbing. And I couldn't understand why. It's because I was connected to his unresolved grief over what he had experienced.

So here's me sobbing in war films and saying, I can't watch this. I can't watch this. Tell me when it's over. And then only as I was able to grieve somehow for him. So what you're asking about is can you grieve? Yeah. Ancestral trauma. Yes, you can.

You can honor those who you can honor those who went before you and who live their lives in ways that was the best they could do at the time. Maybe with whatever experiences were happening around them, whatever it was, you know, colonialism, wars, deprivations, persecutions. inequalities, all of the things that happen through the entire history of the human race. So, and let's bring it back to love now. How do you love that? How do you love that?

Well, actually, you can't. You know, but what you can do, what you can do is you can look at all the great teachers and you see, what did they do? What did they do? What did Jesus say on the cross? Forgive them for they don't know what they're doing. Wow. That's what love looks like. Forgive them because they don't know what they're doing.

So yes, that's what love looks like. We can forgive. Love is forgiveness. It says that's free. People think, oh, if I forgive, I can't forgive because then that lets them off fall free. No, actually, love is courage, but love is forgiveness. forgiveness. Forgiving releases us so that our heart is free. Well, if you're interested in my book, I talk about forgiveness, give some exercises for forgiveness, explain white forgiveness.

Self-forgiveness is so important. And there's beautiful prayers and processes that we can do that help us forgive and that we can learn because forgiveness is a process. We can decide to mentally give, I want to forgive. But then there's something deep inside of us. It's going, I think I'll hold that much just a little bit longer. That's not healthy for us. Okay. Forgiveness, part of love. Self-love means we forgive ourselves and others,

because that's what sets us free. So that means coming to terms with our own mistakes, our own character flaws. Doesn't mean ignoring that they're there. Doesn't mean not taking responsibility for them. When we make a mistake, we need to clean it up. We need to be responsible. That's part of love too. It's cleaning up our mistakes the best that we can, correcting ourselves as much as we can,

making those changes where we're able to, owning them. You know, none of this is easy. Please don't think I just consider easy. These are hard to have the spiritual path. And we have to learn them over and over and over. Oh, gosh, am I in that again? Oh, gosh, okay. And so this is how the heart matures on the spiritual path.

You know, the heart grows wise, the heart matures. We have a greater capacity to share love and to give love and to receive love. So it's courage, it's self-awareness, it's courage, it's acceptance, it's forgiveness. Yeah. It's so beautiful in so many ways. I love learning and watching the world unfold as the new information comes in. And you can take it and look back on other ways in which you've applied it to your life and see your relationships just a little smidgen of a difference.

But it's a world of difference in the same way to see. it that way? Well, you know what? I don't know who said this first, but it's a well-known saying that if you, you, you know, if you launch, if you launch a ship off the coast of Europe somewhere, pick any port, Marseille, okay? If you change the course by one degree, you'll end up in Miami instead of New York, okay? And so a small change over a distance will make a big difference in, in direction you head in.

And so all the little small changes that we can make on a daily basis. So we're into self-care. And if we love ourselves, we take care of ourselves. So self-love is self-care. The first gift we got in this lifetime is a body. Do we take care of our body? Do we make sure that it gets the nourishment it needs, the rest it needs, or do we hate it, or do we start it, or neglected, or punish it?

the number, and that's part of our society and culture. We're seeing a large change in what is beauty, this last period of time. Beauty used to be very defined by culture. This is beautiful. And then something would be put in front of us as an image of beautiful. It didn't matter if it was a car or a piece of jewelry or a fashion or the way a woman was supposed to look. And these days, that's, you know, in the last while, that's been changing. So it looks like culture and society is learning to find beauty in the individual.

The beauty can be found everywhere. An exercise I used to give my students in a course I taught called nourishing wisdom. I taught that for years. And it's about our relationship with our body and ourselves and our mother, who was our first source of nourishment in utero. And then if we were breastfed. So our first deep anchoring with food comes from our relationship with our mother and how that is and then how we relate to Mother Earth. Okay. And then how we relate to our own body, which comes from Mother and Mother Earth.

Okay. And what role does love play there? Well, if we love ourselves and love our body and love Mother Earth, then we're going to have a healthy relationship going in there. And how do we get to that healthy place of taking. care of our body in a way that says, I love me, my being, not just my body, not just my mind. Silly mind has silly thoughts lots of times, but I can forgive it. Silly mind. Silly thoughts.

So loving means accepting that this is the body I get in this lifetime. Now how do I take care of it? In volume two, some of the material we're working with in this period of time, there's something called the Circle of Wholeness. That's part two. And I cover all of the information on self-care in the circle of wholeness, nutrition, exercise, meditation, prayer, our relationship with the earth, with community, with the divine, and modern science, ancient traditions. What's our relationship with all of this? and how do we find balance and wholeness and health. So self-love is a path that we walk in a space that we create in which we can grow.

Yeah, it's really well said when you sum it up like that. But I think that for people that are watching, like this is what the book looks like. And I recommend everybody go and check it out because it is a guidebook. And it's even though we've covered but a few. pages in this particular episode, I feel like there's a, there's that Ariadne thread that runs through the whole book, this idea of love that kind of combines all of it. And I love that you can, like I got all kinds of little like, you know, note, nope thing is in there and stuff that, that I always just turned back to back, wait a minute, is that the, like, there's a certain poem

that was written or there's a certain story that was written. And it's really well documented. But I love that about the book, that I can turn to it and find something in the paragraph that I was just thinking about. You know, it's whole, but at the same time, I can go back and piece things together. Well, you know, I tried to put about 40, 50 years, well, and more of personal experiences. And what I learned on the path, what I learned in academics and what I learned from the teachers I trained and the elders I trained with and apprenticed with. And I was 14 years in my apprenticeship in the Santo Dining under the elders of Mapia and of my Bichina. And, you know, I like to think that I'm an okay student, okay? And I was full of questions and wanting to learn and still am.

And the more open-minded we are, the more willing we are to learn and to grow, then I think that we have the best opportunity, but we also need wisdom and discernment as to what we choose. to take in and what we choose because there's so much information out there, George. There's so much information. So that's why it was so important to me in these books to not just tell my story, which my editor told me I had to put more in my personal story in, so it did. To put to science and to put the really good material that I found really spoke well. Nothing flaky, nothing new agey.

I'm not new age, I'm transpersonal, okay? And there's so much stuff out there that, you know, people can find. And some of it is so well done and so valuable and so important. And then there's stuff that you think, where did that come from? There's no science behind it. There's no nothing. There's no tradition behind it. There's no history to it.

You can't point to it and say, okay, well, this has been part of the human experience. And so, you know, my advice is for those of you listening who want to develop a greater sense of self-love, I hope you find my books interesting. And I hope that you continue to do a deeper inner study with compassion. You know, maybe we'll close for today with kind of a prayer. It's not really prayer. It's not really prayer. it's called Mera and it is

attributed to the Buddhist tradition may I be at peace may my heart remain open may I awaken to the light of my own true nature may I be healed may I be a source of healing for all beings

yeah wow yeah that may my heart remain open and so that's this is the path. This is for me the true spiritual path. It doesn't matter which spiritual path people are on.

They are all good. They have heart. They're good. But if the core, the spiritual path should be, the heart remains open. In spite of all the things that happen and the difficulties and the challenges, how do we walk in integrity and authenticity and keep our heart open? Because if you haven't noticed, it closes really quickly and easily. Yeah. Slam.

Shotgun behind it. Yeah. This is, this is human. That's all it is. It's just human. Anyway, today's been fun. Wow. Beautiful.

This might be one of my favorite lectures so far. And maybe it has to do with where I am in my life or the world around me. Or maybe it is just the lovely spirit that you bring to the conversation and shining a light for people here to get to see and help. I just want to say, too, when it comes to the idea of the book, it really shines through your lived experiences. Because I don't think anybody without the amount of love and experience that you've done in your life could write it.

It really, it appeals to not only the different senses, but I feel like it changes the sense ratio. You know what I mean by that? Like it allows you to not just see it from a type of graphical instance. And I think that the way you've written it is what allows for that. So thank you for that. Well, I feel like a lot of it was kind of channeled. I can see that.

Thank you so much. I'm just like the vessel, I feel. It's as if, is this spirit around me decided all of the things that I'd been teaching, all the things that I experienced it, it took from that and it said this, okay? And I just spent like four years just, you know, because I was still working and busy and working on exemption processes and stuff like that. I spent the better part of four years taking notes and things that I'd written and all my favorite books and the things I'd highlight and all of them.

And just I felt compelled to just put it all together in these two books. And so there you go. It's beautiful. It's very beautiful. Always a pleasure. I look forward to seeing you next month. Next month we are doing self-respect. Fantastic.

Looking forward to it. And here's a shout out from our friend Kristen Taylor, who says, this was so beautiful. Thank you. Thank you, Kristen. We really appreciate it. And I will thank you again for your time and I really enjoy talking to you and I love learning. But before I let you go, where can people find you and what do you have coming up?

Okay. So people can find me on my personal website, which is www. R-Av-D-R-Gessica-R-Rogester.com. I just kind of my name with the rev doctor in front of it. And people who don't confuse me with are your Santa. I mean church. That has its own website. I am not a shortcut into it. Okay. So it really is I offer videos and audios for educational purposes. So they're all free. It just feels like part of my calling is just to try to educate about the non-ordinary states of consciousness to educate about these

principles that are so dear in my heart. And so people are very welcome to, the site is actually getting an update, a big update right now. So if things are a little bit slow, trying to load or trying to access, please be a little bit patient. So I'm carrying on, looking eagerly to having a little downtime this summer. They ask me what's coming up. So I'm, you know, can take a little kind of quiet time and a little bit of vacation and just take a long, slow deep breath and look at the next projects. I'm excited. I'm excited for our conversation coming up.

I'm excited to see what the moments of reflection help you project later in the upcoming projects. I hope that you have a tremendous and beautiful rest of your day. My family and I are getting rid of head out of the beach and that's going to be a beautiful day. So thank you for everything today. Always a pleasure, George. Thanks a million.

Okay. Fantastic. to everybody listening. To everybody listening. Aloha.